American Egg-smashing Ritual

With the luxury and the burden of working from a home office, I plan my trips into the city judiciously.  I knew I’d have one meeting in town today so I planned two others around it.  This was going to be a smashing success until my wife reminded me that I’d promised to speak to her class right in the middle of these scheduled meetings.  I’ve been told by a regular reader that traffic reports are not especially good copy, so I’ll spare you detail on the trip in the trip out the trip back in and the trip back out.  They all occurred. 

When I came back out the first time, my wife wanted me to speak to a group of eight year-olds about Easter.  No.  I wasn’t on the hook for reckoning with the mysteries of Resurrection.  Rather I was supposed to talk about what bunnies and candy were like for me as a kid in the U.S.  I told them the story my father has always told me, which seemed wonderful, if a bit fantastic, as a kid.  According to the old man, the crew in New Rochelle would assemble and then carefully manage a pillowcase or two’s worth of candy from Halloween, until, with only a Mary Jane or two left, they would arrive at Easter, when they would be once again replenished by the magic hasenpfeffer.  My own efforts to save Halloween candy never made it past November, as I recall, but it’s a nice story, all the same.  Prudence and self-denial: good Christian values.

I had no intention of considering it again, but my wife reminded me that, on a whim, as I recall, I had taken the kids out to the back wall of her compound, and instructed them all to throw their hard boiled, painted Easter eggs against the wall.  I’d run out of things to say about bunnies and this was high-tone.  The kids absolutely loved it.  Now, a year on, I felt a bit like Elder Cunningham in “Book of Mormon” asked to recount the detail and lead the ceremony of the “traditional” American egg-smashing ritual.  

This year, as I went through my discussion, one child and then another made it clear that they most assuredly expected we were going to smash eggs this year.  “Really?  OK.  Right.  Egg-smashing.  Of course.  We’ll get to that.”  They gathered up their eggs and I suggested I wanted to first check the smashing wall.  I suspected, correctly, that the area we smashed eggs at last time was no longer uninhabited.  Indeed, whereas last time the wall was abandoned, there was now someone getting a massage behind a window on the wall we’d last year done our damage. 

“OK.  Follow me.”  This barricade to the construction site will do.  I told them to try to hit a character in the center of an old sign on the wall.  Who ever hits it is the “winner.”  The first child tossed his egg and I quickly discerned that the eggs they painted this year had not been boiled first.   “No, that’s OK.  We’ll clean it up later.”

Thursday, 04/14/17